First of all, as a Canadian, I really like Medicare. So I want to recognize that I appreciate social services. However, from an economic point of view, they are madly inefficient. There is a tension between "greedy and corrupt" and "lazy and corrupt". I don't think Free Market Principals are the be all and end all. FMP doesn't take into account luck that is behind almost all success stories. However, it does tend to count value of work efficiently. Again there certainly are exceptions to this.
The 2008 crash killed a lot of businesses that may have had the bad luck to be in a start up phase. Then I saw unbelievable events that really stopped FMP, masked under the Banking Bailout in the US. For example Washington Mutual was a bank that was in trouble. The US gov't (not fmp) finally gave it to Wells Fargo under the following conditions: Wells Fargo would accept all WM's assets but none of its liabilities. If you had a WM mortgage, and FMP allowed it to totally collapse, there would be a lot of people in the Pacific North West without a mortgage, loan payment, or over-draft. With such wealth at the bottom of the economy the housing collapse would have had a hard time happening. Capitalization of the poor/middle class was the answer to the Bank's corruption. It is too simplistic to suggest that disasterous things were not in the offing due to the fact liquidity is absolutely neccessary to move goods in the market. But this was something I saw, that I was struck by. FMP was not allowed to play out. So the US has an extra 6-7 trillion in debt on it's plate. Mind boggling.
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